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Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Nobody Else But You (September 20th and 22nd at the Cleveland Cinematheque)

[NOBODY ELSE BUT YOU
screens Thursday September 20th at 8:45 pm and Saturday September
22nd at 7:15 pm at the Cleveland Cinematheque.]

Review by Bob
Ignizio

The protagonist of NOBODY ELSE BUT
YOU (Poupoupidou)
won this writer over the moment he put his car in reverse and pulled
over to the side of the road just so he wouldn't lose reception while
The Sonics “Shot Down” was playing on the radio. Aside from
showing that Rousseau (Jean-Paul Rouve) has good taste in American
garage rock bands, the scene also serves to give him his first look
at Candice Lecoeur (Sophie Quinton) via her image on a billboard for
cheese. The audience has already been introduced to Candice in the
opening credits, dancing nude behind sheer fabric, seemingly happy.

As we eventually
learn, Candice is (was) a local celebrity spokes-model for a cheese
company who parlayed her limited fame into a job as a sexy weather
girl. She also believed herself to be the reincarnation of Marilyn
Monroe. As Candice tells us in voice-over, she was just about to
begin a new diary which she hoped might symbolize a new and better
direction for her life. Instead, it marked the end. The now deceased
Candice goes on to explain that she hasn't written for three days
because that's how long she's been dead.

Rousseau
has come to the small town where Candice lived for the reading of his
Uncle's will, which yields him a taxidermied dog for his troubles. A
hack mystery writer described more than once as something of a James
Ellroy wannabe, Rousseau is intrigued when he hears the news of
Candice's death. Since the girl's body was found in an area of “no
man's land” between France and Switzerland, and since it looks to
be a suicide, the local police have closed the case without
investigating. Rousseau finds all this a bit odd, and so takes it
upon himself to do a little detective work, along the way teaming up
with a gay police officer (Guillaume Gouix)
who shares his suspicions. Candice's unseen spirit occasionally
provides post-mortem commentary on their efforts, and wonders if she
might not still be alive if she had just met Rousseau a little
sooner.

The
film makes use of a lot of familiar elements such as the narration by
a dead character (SUNSET BOULEVARD),
a protagonist who becomes obsessed with a beautiful dead woman to the
point that it borders on necrophila (LAURA),
a quirky small town surrounded by forest whose beauty queen turns up
dead (TWIN PEAKS),
speculation about the death of Marilyn Monroe, and a mystery writer
turned detective (too many precedents to mention) just to name to the
most obvious ones. NOBODY ELSE BUT YOU
then takes these well worn tropes and assembles them into something
fairly fresh and original. The film has a voice all its own, and even
the character types we've see before are given new spins.
Writer/director Gérald Hustache-Mathieu may not quite have crafted a
masterpiece here, but he has at least given us a smart and
entertaining mystery with interesting characters, clever twists, and
a well realized theme about the price beauty and fame, even of a minor
kind, can sometimes exact. 3 out of 4 stars.